I Left The Wolf King Who Loved Me For The Dragon King Chapter 02

I Left The Wolf King Who Loved Me For The Dragon King Chapter 02

“Those statuettes belonged to my mother!”

I snapped my head up, my gaze piercing straight into his.

“Did I force Bryony to accept the marriage proposal from the Dragon King? She spends a few days crying in fear, and your heart bleeds for her. But when I am the one being shipped off to marry a dying monster, you couldn’t care less!”

“If Bryony is the only daughter you claim, why didn’t you just throw me into an orphanage the day my mother died?”

I took a sharp breath, my voice cutting through the tense silence like a blade.

“And those three lunar statuettes were part of my mother’s dowry. They were meant for me. I am reclaiming what is rightfully mine—what gives you the right to call me greedy?”

The barrage of questions hit Grimm like physical blows. The veins in his forehead bulged with suppressed rage, yet he couldn’t summon a single word to defend himself.

He glared at me for a long time, searching for even a tremor of doubt in my expression. Finding none, he finally ground his teeth.

“Fine. I don’t have the patience to argue semantics with you. As long as you take her place in the dragon’s carriage, I don’t care what you do.” He waved a dismissive hand. “The statuettes are kept in the ancestral shrine. I will instruct the High Priest to let you remove them before you leave.”

I let out a cold, hollow laugh and turned toward the door.

Just as my hand touched the brass handle, Grimm spoke from behind me, a final question breaking through his frustration.

“I can understand you wanting your mother’s relics. But why keep this a secret from Ulvarr? He’s a vanguard warrior, isn’t he?” Grimm frowned, genuinely perplexed.

“The man is supposedly half-dead with love for you. He was willing to defy the entire Selwyn bloodline just to claim you. Your fated mate ritual is supposed to happen in a matter of days—how exactly do you intend to explain this to him?”

“I won’t.”

The words dropped from my lips, freezing the air between us. My face was a mask of absolute, unyielding stone.

Grimm stared at me, a sudden realization dawning on him. The daughter he had spent a lifetime ignoring—the one he assumed was a docile, compliant shadow—was not the broken thing she appeared to be.

But the moment the heavy oak door clicked shut behind me, the mask fractured. The stinging heat of tears finally rushed to my eyes.

I hurried back to my quarters. My room was tucked away at the very end of the servant’s wing—cramped, narrow, and smelling faintly of damp rot.

On the small wooden desk sat a charcoal sketch of Ulvarr and me. Looking at it felt like a silver blade plunging directly into my chest and twisting.

Suddenly, the murmur of voices drifted down from the ceiling. I froze, pressing my back against the cold stone wall, realizing the sound was carrying through the open window from the terrace above.

Directly above me was Bryony’s room.

“Still pouting, princess? All you have to do is beg a little. Tell me you love me, and I won’t touch a single hair on your sister’s head,” Ulvarr’s voice floated down.

The tone was completely foreign to me—arrogant, dripping with a casual, predatory playfulness. It sounded far more authentic than any whisper of devotion he had ever offered me.

Then came the rustle of heavy silk, followed by the heavy, ragged sound of breathing as they caught each other in a fierce, breathless embrace.

It had always been this way.

Shortly after my mother’s funeral, my father returned to the estate with a heavily painted woman and a daughter who shared my exact birth year.

From that moment on, the entire Selwyn world revolved around Bryony. Everyone gravitated toward her light, leaving me in the dark.

Bryony was given the grandest, sunniest suite in the manor. Because she suffered from a mild seasonal allergy, I was strictly forbidden from even walking down her corridor.

My father had enforced the rule after Bryony wept to the elders, claiming I carried a “foul, stagnant scent” that made her suffer.

When I was old enough, I joined the vanguard tryouts, desperate to prove I could still be a warrior without a wolf.

But Bryony told the high council that a wolf-less hybrid was a liability to the pack’s line. She convinced the elders to strike my name from the roster, joining the high-ranking eldor elites in mocking my pathetic ambition.

I refused to let them break me. Denied the sword, I turned to the earth, studying flora and ancient remedies in hopes of becoming a healer. I spent months building a hidden greenhouse by the eastern stream, nurturing rare moon-orchids.

Three months later, I returned to find the structure smashed to pieces. The leather-bound ledger containing years of my anatomical notes had been torn apart, its pages scattered in the mud.

When I confronted her, Bryony simply smiled. “I just thought it would be fun,” she had said.

Later, during my winters in the courtyard, I developed a quiet affection for a young vanguard scout. The moment Bryony noticed my lingering glances, she cornered him.

Within days, she was parading him through the keep, eventually orchestrating a public gathering where he loudly denounced me, calling me an embarrassment to the Selwyn bloodline who should be cast out into the wastes.

She bored of him and threw him away less than a week later.

Time and time again, anything I built, anything I cherished, Bryony would break or claim for herself just to prove she could.

And with every passing year, the walls of my home grew colder.

“You are the older sister,” Grimm would lecture me whenever I dared to look slighted. “It is your duty to yield to her.”

My stepmother would pull me into the vacant study, her eyes glittering with malice. “Bryony carries the true inheritance of the Selwyn lineage. You are nothing but a defective remnant, Aylin.”

I had wanted to fight back. I had wanted to scream the truth. But a few tears from Bryony were all it took to instantly shift the family’s allegiance, leaving me holding the blame.

So, when Bryony recently announced with smug satisfaction that she intended to seduce the vanguard warrior who had been courting me, I didn’t even have the energy to rage. I was already done. I had already resolved to strip myself of the family name and take my chances as a rogue in the dead-lands.

And then, right at the edge of my despair, I had met Ulvarr.